Energetics of group foraging: Analysis of a random-walk model

Abstract

Several recent publications present mathematical models of foraging by groups of individuals which assume (1) that the time taken to find food patches is inversely proportional to group size and (2) that the time taken for others to travel to a discovered patch is negligible compared to the time taken for its discovery. Implicitly, these nonspatial models consider that searching individuals and food patches are always homogeneously mixed. The authors present a spatially explicit model, where individuals forage by performing a 2-D random walk. Using a mixture of simulation and analytic results, it is suggested that the two assumptions above may often be unrealistic. For this reason, we argue for the greater consideration of spatial effects in future studies of group foraging.